Losing Syria, and my grandmother

JULY 20, 2017

I lost both Syria and my grandmother in 1980, when I was 6 years old. Though men — especially one man, Hafez al-Assad — dominated Syria, my early experiences of it were dominated by women, especially my grandmother. To me, she was Syria and Syria was her.

My parents were living in the United States but committed to returning home. Then two tragedies struck in quick succession. In June, while we were in Damascus as usual for the summer, my grandmother’s brother was murdered, with no consequences for the killer or killers — a commonplace occurrence in Assad’s Syria. In October, while visiting us in the United States to try to escape the grief, anger, and impotence she felt following her brother’s death, my grandmother suffered a stroke that left her “locked in.”  [full story]

For Syrian-Americans, the Travel Ban Feels Alarmingly Familiar

FEB 5, 2017

On Saturday morning, I woke up to a panicked message from my friend Kinan Azmeh, in Beirut. He wanted to know, “Do you think I can no longer go back to America?”

A virtuoso on the clarinet and a brilliant composer, Kinan was fresh from a concert in Germany where he had débuted his latest work with the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, with whom he tours as a member of the Silk Road ensemble.  [full story]

In Rebuke of Forgetfulness

DECEMBER, 2016

By now, this should all be rather familiar, we’ve been here so many times before: where there is war, displacement always follows.

Similarly, we should all know that as much as these are destructive forces, they are also integral in shaping the makeup of the many societies they touch, no matter how these countries emerge in the after – whether in triumph or defeat. And no one is really untouched. Most nations that we take for granted as cohesive today were themselves products of demographic shifts and movements, often as a result of conflict – either within their borders or from without.  [full story]

The Road to Germany : $2400

JAN/FEB 2016

Each of the millions of Syrian refugees who have fled their brutalized, unrecognizable homeland did so for uniquely personal reasons — the regime bombarding cities, the Islamic State threatening a return to the dark ages, the loss of jobs in a crumbling economy. Yet their quests cohered around one purpose: They all wanted better lives.

Some set out on a complicated journey to Europe with a crude graphic — a flowchart of the route from Turkey to Germany — as a guide. In its rudimentary geometry, refugees saw an impossible dream. In its illustrated stick figures, kicking their heels upon reaching the final destination, they saw themselves. They allowed an image, powerful and meditative in its simplicity, to shape their personal stories.

FP has done the same. In the following story, the odyssey of several refugees — men, women, and children — is presented in the form of a nonfiction comic. Each panel is based on firsthand reporting gathered by journalist Alia Malek:   [full story]

Enduring Exile

OCT 14, 2013

Two years ago, in September, Anto’s neighbors warned him: it was time for him to go. He would no longer be safe in these hills above the city of Idlib in northwestern Syria. He knew better than to doubt them.

A descendant of Armenians from Ottoman Turkey, he had inherited a dormant vigilance that now came to life. Anto’s father used to tell him, repeating what had been passed down through four generations: “Like we came from Turkey, we may also one day leave from Syria.”

With his neighbors’ warnings in his ears, Anto scrambled to secure some cash. He started to quietly sell off whatever he could from Abu Artin, a restaurant and inn that his family had operated every spring and summer since 1938. His grandfather had built Abu Artin, named for Anto’s great-grandfather, high in these hills as an escape for Syrians living in the swelter of those months in the cities and towns below. The land offered fresh air, their kitchen delectable food, and the men—Anto and his father and grandfather before him—impromptu musical performances that had made them famous with customers.  [full story]

The Syria the World Forgot

JUNE 8, 2013

LAST month, while we waited at the Lebanese border for our papers to be processed so that we could return to Syria, a woman traveling in our shared taxi pointed at the clouds gathering in the sky and said, “The Orthodox will be happy.”

She was referring to the annual contest between Syrian Catholics and Orthodox Christians — whose religious calendars diverge at Easter — that looks to meteorology to settle which church crucified and resurrected Jesus on the right weekend that year. The winning combo is a rainy Good Friday with a perfectly clear Easter Sunday.  [full story]

The Hills of Alawistan

MAY 27, 2013

TARTOUS, Syria — Above the Syrian coastal town of Tartous, groups of Alawite men and boys were amassing at different landings along a road that winds higher and higher, away from the Mediterranean and into the hills. We saw them assembling as we traveled the same path, taking advantage of a day off to get out of the city.

On this new spring Sunday, they were waiting for the corpses of Alawite soldiers — conscripts in the Syrian Army — to arrive from below. A funeral procession was building, one motorcycle at a time, one open-cabbed truck at a time, each laden with several passengers. The mothers and wives were recognizable in their black clothes with sheer white scarves draped around their necks, which have become public uniform once a family has been anointed with loss.   [full story]

Armenians Fleeing Anew as Syria Erupts in Battle

DEC 12, 2012

YEREVAN, Armenia — At the newly opened Cilician School in this former Soviet republic, the textbooks are in Arabic, photocopied from a single set flown out of war-torn Syria. The curriculum is Syrian, the flag on the principal’s desk is Syrian, and the teachers and students are all Syrians.

They are also ethnic Armenians, driven by Syria’s civil war to a notional motherland most barely know.  [full story]

Syria: When Official Memory is Amnesia

NOV 9, 2012

With those who would kill him waiting at each of the gates of Damascus should he try to escape, Saul of Tarsus, the man who would come to be known as Christianity’s St. Paul, fled nonetheless.  Crouching in a basket, he was lowered over the city’s walls by his supporters, and he fled into the Syrian night.

It was nearly two thousand years ago that Saul, a soldier, came from Jerusalem to Damascus, dispatched and hell-bent on a mission to arrest followers of Jesus Christ—a man who, among other things, had led an affront to the ruling regime of Rome and the Jewish clergy. But instead, along the road to Damascus, his journey was interrupted by what Christian lore describes as the appearance of Jesus (post-crucifixion) in a light so strong that Saul was blinded.  [full story]

Home: Reflections for Anthony Shadid

AUG 2, 2012

This week, Anthony Shadid’s memoir  House of Stone – which tells of the author’s attempts to rebuild his dilapidated family home in Marjayoun, Lebanon and in turn of a search for identity in a restless Middle East – was published in the UK. To celebrate, Granta is publishing a series of short meditations by writers including Teju Cole, Rawi Hage, Ha Jin, A.L. Kennedy, Yiyun Li and Santiago Roncagliolo on where we think of – if anywhere – when we think of going home.

As part of Anthony Shadid week, granta.com has also published an interview with the author, a travelogue by photographer Michael Robinson-Chavez on his time on assignment in Iraq with Shadid and a guide to Lebanese street food by Annia Ciezadlo.  [full story]